- And a police informant who agreed to double-cross her best friend by wearing a microphone to tape-record her friend's bitter complaints about her ex-husband.

It sounds like the characters in a made-for-TV movie. But perhaps the most interesting player in Courtroom 4012 was defense attorney Kathleen Zellner.

Zellner is a high-profile Naperville lawyer who made front-page news in September when she won a release from Death Row and new trial for her client Joseph Burrows, convicted of murdering an 88-year-old man in 1988.

Zellner was also in the spotlight last March when she announced that a client of hers who died in prison, Larry Eyler, had secretly confessed to the unsolved murders of 21 young men and boys.

But the Superson trial, which is to conclude next Thursday with a ruling by Judge Ronald Mehling, may prove one of Zellner's most difficult yet.

Superson, a 40-year-old doctor who practiced in Bolingbrook, has been charged with trying to hire a hit man in March 1993 to kill her ex-husband, Dr. Leon Malachinski of Naperville.

She allegedly wanted him killed because she lost custody of their two children after a bitter divorce battle, according to prosecutors.

Assistant State's Attorneys Phil Montgomery and David Bayer gathered what appears to be an impressive mountain of evidence, including video and audio tapes of Superson discussing a murder-for-hire plot with an undercover Naperville police officer.

They also have physical evidence: slips of paper found in Superson's purse with the names and phone numbers of a member of the Hell's Henchmen motorcycle gang and a "hit man" who was actually an undercover cop.

And then there was testimony from a Naperville police officer that Superson confessed to offering $500 to her brother-in-law to hire two thugs to beat up her ex-husband in 1985.

Into this cloud Zellner shot a laserlike argument with a narrow focus. Her aim was the legal definition of solicitation of murder for hire.

Illinois law says that to be guilty of solicitation, a defendant must negotiate a "contract, agreement, understanding, command or request for money or anything else of value" with the intention of carrying out a murder.

Zellner argued that her client's videotaped conversation with an undercover cop posing as a hit man on March 16, 1993, was so ambiguous that it didn't approach the legal definition of a "contract."

Nor was there even an "understanding," Zellner asserted, because they never agreed on the specifics of the plan and never resolved how and when the hit man would be paid.

"Your honor can listen to that tape backwards and forwards and you'll never hear my client requesting the murder of her husband," Zellner told Mehling.

Superson said "uh-huh" when the hit man asked "so you want him dead?" Later, when the hit man tells her, "to make him totally disappear, I want $8,000," she responds "uh-huh" again.

When the hit man explained she probably wouldn't be able to collect insurance money if her ex-husband mysteriously disappeared, Superson responded: "He can take that money to his grave."

Now there's an unambiguous word. The question is: Would your average hit man understand what to do if he heard that?